Note the extremely clever nature of the virus: The request was written
in a friendly tone, all the better to force a social engineering attack.
The attack required only two steps, thereby making it much more likely
to succeed.

In fact, if I had not been so flustered by this clever virus and
momentarily forgotten my system's root password, it could very well
have succeeded.

In order to protect innocent Linux users from this virus, I am
recommending that McAfee, Trend Micro and all the other anti-virus
vendors immediately release products for Linux, and in particular, block
all e-mail with the words "su", "touch", "echo", "mail", and "Hi" in them.
Consider those my contribution to the first Linux Virus Signature Database.